Actress, kickboxing champ scores big on Brooklyn College soccer team

Stephen Yang

Florina Petcu, 37, isn't your average college athlete.

Meet Brooklyn College's Renaissance Woman.

Florina Petcu certainly isn't your average college athlete – and it has little to do with being a 37-year-old senior amongst teammates half her age.

The feisty Romanian-born Petcu previously enjoyed success as a International actress, ballet dancer and a world champ in Muay Thai kickboxing.

So it shouldn't surprise those closest to Petcu – whose Hollywood roles include a critically acclaimed part in Spike Lee's "Inside Man" – that she'd seek a new role during her last semester: auditioning for the college's new women's soccer team.

One problem – she never played soccer or any other organized team sport in her life.

"I was nervous," Petcu told the Post. "I'm not going to lie, but what a gift it's been playing on the college level. At my age, in a completely new sport; it's been an incredible ride."

Petcu, of Crown Heights, not only made the squad. She was named a starting defender and co-captain and helped guide the club to a respectable 6-7-1 record in its inaugural season, only a game short of qualifying for the CUNY Athletic Conference playoffs.

BC Athletic Director Bruce Filosa said he's never come across a college athlete with such an accomplished off-the-field resume.

"What an incredible background," he gushed. "Plus, she's a model citizen, and she's been a role model for her entire team."

Prior to putting on soccer cleats, Petcu nine years earlier took up Muay Thai fighting – a grittier form of standard kickboxing in which fighters can also land blows with their knees and elbows.

The petite 5-foot, 5-inch, 110-pounder – who says her family forbid her from playing sports while growing up under Communism in Bucharest -- quickly rose up the amateur ranks.

Her impressive resume in the flyweight and bantamweight divisions includes a silver medal for Team USA in the 2007 IFMA World Championships, the International Kickboxing Federation world championship in 2008 and World Kickboxing Association US championships in 2009 and 2010.

Although she didn't play sports as a teen, she studied acting and dance and went on to perform many times on Romanian TV and other shows throughout Europe.

Seeking a bigger challenge, she moved to New York in 1997 to take a part in a play, Les Danaides, at the Lincoln Center Festival and has since appeared in many other independent films and plays.

Her best-known US work is a modest -- but scene-stealing part -- in the 2006 film "Inside Man" starring Denzel Washington, in which she earned rave reviews as a self-centered woman who agrees to serve as an Albanian-to-English translator for cops in exchange for them "fixing" a bag filled with parking tickets.

"The best cameo comes from Florina Petcu, as a shameless, cigarette-waving Albanian floozy," the New Yorker wrote.

Florina Petcu acting
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Petcu hasn't acted since 2009 or fought competitively since 2010.

And while she's considering fighting again, she says she has "given up acting."

"I have been acting since I was a kid, but I just don't enjoy it anymore," Petcu said.

She now spends much of her time off campus volunteering at a domestic violence shelter in Harlem.

The honors student, who finished her studies in December and will be receiving a bachelor's of science degree in sports psychology and creative movement/drama therapy, says she wants to pursue a career counseling youths victimized by sexual abuse or domestic violence.

She said she plans to move to California and hopes to enroll in San Francisco State University's master's program in clinical psychology.

Her goal, she says, will be combining her "passion for sports and the arts" into therapy for victims.

rcalder@nypost.com

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